When The Cloud Deletes Our Data: Who "Owns" What We Upload?

When we talk about people losing their data in the cloud, the conversation typically revolves around hackers, violating terms of service or sites going out of business. However, it is important to remember that in a cloud world we rarely have many rights when it comes to the data we upload or create in the cloud environments provided by many consumer companies and that data can be deleted without us even knowing until after it is far too late. Making matters more complicated, even the biggest brand names don’t necessarily operate their own cloud environments or own the underlying data that makes their services run, meaning that a change anywhere in this pipeline can result in irreplaceable data being lost.

I personally learned this the hard way last fall when I discovered that after using Staples to print my business cards and address labels for several years, the designs that I had spent months of effort creating using the company’s online cloud-based design utilities and had happily reordered again and again had suddenly vanished. There were no error warnings, no notifications, no messages of any kind to suggest what had happened to my designs other than an empty account profile when I logged in for my regular reordering.

I had long been concerned about the cloud interface that Staples used, which permitted elaborate designs based on an extensive gallery of templates, but no ability to export even static images of those designs for safe keeping. Given Staples’ prominent brand and sterling reputation, however, I rested assured that if Staples ever made major changes to its cloud service, it would offer a solid transition path for its customers to preserve all of the work they had done in the previous system. Yet, it turns out that was not to be the case.

Last fall, after discovering my designs missing, I calling Staples’ customer service, where a representative told me that the company had sent two emails to its print customers, one in February and one in July notifying them that all of their designs that made use of the templates from the previous system would be deleted in July. Yet, after confirming that I had not received either email and that no such emails had been caught in my spam filter, the company was unable to provide further detail or confirm the specifics of when the emails were sent or what address they were sent from or that my particular email address had been sent them. Moreover, when I noted that I had just reordered a set of cards at the start of July and had received no warning notice in my order confirmation email or on the website itself that the very cards I was reordering would be deleted in a few weeks, the company confirmed that it had made a decision not to send such notices, but did not elaborate further on why.

After reaching out to the company to learn more about how it views the customer data entrusted to it and customers’ rights to access the designs they create using its services, the company’s Director of Public Relations clarified that “Staples Print & Marketing Services is not a cloud storage solution” and that the company’s “practices are fully aligned with industry standards and best practices.” She later clarified that “the template and layout tools that we made available online were not a cloud storage solution for the resulting design, but rather, part of our online ordering platform. We are excited that the platform to which we have migrated will include a full suite of cloud storage tools for designs and logos as part of our planned future enhancements.”

The situation, as she explained, is that “to provide a better customer experience and have more control over our customer communications, Staples migrated to our own design platform from a third-party site. … Unfortunately, the design templates, used by many of our customers, were owned by the third-party, so they were not transferable. In the short-term, we understand that this may have caused some customer dissatisfaction...”

In a follow-up email, a spokesperson from the company’s Office of the President replied that “Much of what was produced via the [previous] Vista site was proprietary due to the fact that Vista owned logos and templates were used. Because of this, we were unable to reproduce a large portion of customer documents as we no longer had access to those designs” and that “from personal experience I know how frustrating it was for many of our customers. It was not our intention to disrupt the business of our customers in this way and for that we are very sorry to have done so.”

In short, Staples had historically outsourced its cloud-based printing platform to a third-party company called Vista Print to run for it and when it decided to bring the site inhouse and build its own cloud platform, it was unable to acquire the rights to the templates that its customers’ designs were based on, meaning a business card designed by a customer in the old system that incorporated one of those templates in any way would be deleted, rather than transitioned to the new system. Only customers who had uploaded designs they had created on their own, not using Staples’ templates, were preserved.

In terms of communication, Staples noted that the “change was communicated in many ways including emails, homepage takeovers and a 1-800 phone number for questions,” but acknowledged that users like myself who simply went directly to the reordering form, rather than browsing the homepage, were not shown the warnings and the company was unable to confirm the details on how it sent out its notification emails and why users like myself did not receive them. It further acknowledged that “with our previous third party relationship, we were limited in the ways we could communicate with customers.” The company also did not respond as to why it did not display an informational notification to users whose content was deleted when they first logged into the new system so that they would be aware of what had happened, instead of leaving them to frantically scour their account to try and find their designs, nor why users who reordered designs that were slated to be deleted were not given a warning during the ordering process or on their order confirmation email.

In an acknowledgement of the difficulties that losing all of their designs might cause its customers, Staples’ Director of Public Relations noted in her response that “In order to mitigate this pain, Staples is offering FREE [emphasis original] design services to our customers. We will help any returning customer create new designs to meet their needs.” She further emphasized that “customers have been largely please[d] with the free design service” and repeatedly noted the impact of the company’s “free redesign” service on recovering customers’ work.

Sure, enough, after calling customer service and requesting this free design service, I was referred to a customer service representative who told me that all I had to do was send them a photo of my old card and they would create a new design for me that exactly recreated it in their new platform completely free of charge. They then forwarded me to Staples’ design team who said they had never heard of the free program and that I had been misinformed that Staples was offering any services to those who had lost their work in the transition from the previous system. After further clarification, the design team said they had been completely unaware of the service, but were now familiar with it and asked that I mail the physical card to them and they would complete the redesign.

Yet, after logging in to see the final redesigned card, all I was presented with was a smudgy flatbed scanner image of the card, complete with dirt and ink stains from mailing it to them. Further, given the offset printing method used to produce the original card, the scan contained patterns of octagonal colored shapes rather than recognizable solid colored areas, making it completely unusable for reprints.

When I asked for comment on this apparent discrepancy, Staples confirmed that the “FREE design services” advertised by their Director of Public Relations and their customer service representative solely entailed having customers mail a copy of their content in and having Staples scan it to a static image on a flatbed scanner, smudges, ink stains and all.

A spokesperson from the company’s Office of the President noted that "this was not ideal in some cases, especially with originals containing rich graphics and fine text" and thus “in some escalated cases, we had offered complimentary service” in which the design team had actually created a brand-new design in the new system, rather than just scanning the item on a flatbed scanner, but that “this was an internal process offered on a case-by-case basis” and only available for “escalated situations that fell outside of our normal process.” The company declined to offer any estimates on the number of customers impacted, the number who received the flatbed scanning or free design services or the number who paid out of their own pockets to recreate designs they lost from the old system, citing that such information was proprietary.

Putting this all together, we have the story of a major brand name outsourcing their cloud-based platform to a third-party company who owned the rights to all of the templates in the platform. The brand decides to insource its cloud platform and in the process, loses access to all of the templates its customers have spent years building their content on, with no notice beyond a homepage alert and two emails that not all customers received that everything they had created using all of those templates would be lost forever. After advertising “free redesign” services, it turns out all the company was offering was a free flatbed scan, with only a very small number of “escalated cases” offering more substantive recovery services. At the end of the day, most of those non-“escalated” customers were left with nothing more than an empty user account and a complete loss of all of the work they had spent years developing. In short, after relying on the company for years, in a blink of an eye everything they had created was gone. As more and more companies turn to similar cloud platforms to interact with their customers, those customers should keep in mind that at any moment everything they’ve invested in that platform could disappear before their very eyes.

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never before...